Class Schedule for Spring 2025

In a November 2014 speech U.S. President Barack Obama invoked one of our most ubiquitous contemporary clichés: “More than any other invention of our time, the Internet has unlocked possibilities we could just barely imagine a generation ago.” Like the former President himself, you use the internet and other digital network technologies daily, be it in the form of emailing, twittering, text messaging, web research, Tik Tok, YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, Snapchat, or even just making a simple phone call. Some of us are on the internet all day every day.

Many of us take these technological transformations as a sign of great hope. Thus Obama ended his speech with another familiar cliché: “The Internet has been one of the greatest gifts our economy — and our society — has ever known. But what is the internet, this “greatest gift”? How well do we understand this ubiquitous and familiar feature of our everyday world? What is the internet capable of and what new capacities does it present to us? What new ethical, social, and political capacities does the internet enable? What does it render obsolete, problematic, or perhaps even impossible? As the world around us is being restructured, the socio-technology we call the internet and related social-technical assemblages pose critical questions for many of the familiar assumptions that structure the world in which we live.

This course offers an exploration of some of the very real problems posed by new internet, information, communication, and computer techno-practices. From the perspective of philosophy, the internet raises a number of crucial challenges to modern value theory (ethics, political philosophy) and modern epistemology (the theory of knowledge and science). In the realm of value theory, which will be our primary focus in this course, critical questions include the protection of personal information and personal privacy, self-representation and the creation of identity, and issues concerning property most especially intellectual property.

This course will accordingly address three philosophical topics all of which are central to the impact of the internet on society today: privacy (& surveillance), property (& sharing), and personhood (& identity). Other subtopics we will consider along the way in some of our lectures include algorithmic bias and disinformation. Through these topics, this course will offer you the opportunity to reflect upon ways in which the discipline of philosophy might enable us to respond to these and other pressing problems. We shall not expect to be able to deliver any definitive solutions by the end of the course. Our focus will be on the challenging task of finding ways to articulate the problems emerging around us. What we need are concepts that help us understand the massive transformations we are all living in the midst of. Since philosophy involves, among other things, the practice of inventing, analyzing, and criticizing concepts, our goal will be to practice philosophy for the sake of better understanding the contemporary world in which we live.